Laurie Anderson - In discussion with Paul Holdengräber

New York City, the 1970s: Laurie Anderson’s unconventional, pioneering, and imaginative performances shake up the arts scene of the time. With works that seem more like political manifestos – marked by a complete absence of formal structure, a subversion of the rules, and the startling fusion of the spoken word, technology, and multimedia forms – Anderson brought her particular and personal style of storytelling, featuring a variety of human stories and spotlighting social issues that need remedying, to the fore of the art world.

In October 1981, Anderson went from being a well-kept secret of the culturati to an international star overnight thanks to her smash hit “O Superman” inspired by a Massenet aria. The single, copies of which she initially packed and mailed out herself, reached Number 2 in the UK charts. Since then, she has firmly established herself as an incredible composer and singular performer, known as much for her blistering satire as for the tenderness of her approach. She once played the violin while wearing ice skates set into a block of ice that slowly melted inside a New York gallery, and was the first ever artist-in-residence at NASA. She was friends with William S. Burroughs, and married to Lou Reed.

On Friday, July 8, Anderson is coming to the Onassis Stegi Main Stage to flood Athens with her exuberant energy, appearing in a conversation with the master interviewer and Executive Director of OLA House in Los Angeles, Paul Holdengräber. Just two days before her highly-anticipated concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Athenian audiences will be given a unique opportunity to have a close encounter with the high priestess of the electronic music avant-garde and to delve into her scattered thoughts that make sense, all together, and each separately: motivating fears, the end of life on earth, contemporary superstitions myths and legends, passion, tears, birds, democracy, improvisation, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Yoko Ono, Aristophanes, hypnosis, being in the dark, pretending to be asleep, slavery, democracy, different kinds of silence, loss.

Paul Holdengräber, who describes himself as a “curator of public curiosity,” has conversed with some of the most famous people on the planet – everyone from Patti Smith to Jay-Z, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, and Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson – as host of the famous cultural event series “LIVE from NYPL” at the New York Public Library.

Now, as Executive Director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA House), he is continuing these extraordinary encounters on behalf of the Onassis Foundation while also presenting “The Quarantine Tapes,” a podcast series in which major artists, philosophers, and writers – such as Henry Rollins, Maia Kalman, Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, and very many others – speak with him about the human condition, pre-and post-pandemic.

– She was born in 1947 and raised in a small town in Illinois – Glen Ellyn – with her three sisters and four brothers. After attending college in California, she went to New York to study sculpture at Columbia University.

– In Italy, her song “O Superman” became popular in 1988 when it was selected as the soundtrack for the first government campaign to raise AIDS awareness. In 2019, it garnered yet more attention when used as part of Netflix’s first interactive film – an episode of the dystopian “Black Mirror” series titled “Bandersnatch”. On Greek television, the song was used in a commercial selling men’s underwear.

– February 2010 saw the premiere of her performance piece “Delusion”, commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games for its Cultural Olympiad.

– She wrote the music for “The Far Side of the Moon”, a landmark world theater production by Robert Lepage presented at Onassis Stegi in October 2011.

– She has written soundtracks for films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, as well as music for dance performances by Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones and Molissa Fenley.

– Running until July 31, 2022 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the exhibition “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” includes an iconic series of her sculptures and installations. It is the largest retrospective exhibition devoted to this famous artist ever staged in the US.

– On April 9, 2022, her debut album – “Big Science” (1982) – was reissued on vinyl for the first time in 30 years, in a new, bright red edition released by Nonesuch Records.

– She wrote the entry about New York for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

– In a 2017 Guardian interview, she said of her life partner, Lou Reed: “Lou is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met and I think of him all the time and he’s completely inspiring to me. I miss him enormously, but there’s no point in being sad. I see him all the time, he’s always here, a continued, really powerful presence.”

– The New York Times has said that the VR work titled “Chalkroom” (a.k.a. “La Camera Insabbiata”) – which she created in partnership with new media artist Hsin-Chien Huang – “establishes Ms. Anderson as one of the artists VR was invented for.”

– “Chalkroom” premiered in 2017 at the 74th Venice International Film Festival, where it won Best VR Experience.